The Smooth DJ

A presentation by Rolf Skyberg - 400 slides never seemed so captivating.

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Wow - creative move by the LA Times. An old media organization tapping Craigslist (the scourge of all newspapers) for inspiration. I C U is an LATimes.com feature where journalist Katy Newton breaths life into the mysterious postings on Craigslist's (LA) Missed Connections. A quirky idea to say the least, the result is brilliant and oddly addictive.

The goal of human-computer interaction is more intuitive experiences. The iPhone's multi-touch interface was definitely a disruptor in this area. The Yamaha Tenori-on, seen below, is even more mind-blowing.

Techcrunch breaks down all the social aps.

A preview:

...you give the phone a hard shake (the accelerometers inside the phone will measure the movement). The dials will spin around a few times, and you’ll be presented with a suggested restaurant (you can shake again if you’re not satisfied).

Available on the iPhone. Unfortunately, you'll have to pay for the service eventually. My advice to Apple: buy this ap from Shazzam and make it free. The tie-ins to iTunes and added brand-value/utility are no-brainers.

Deconstructing Biggie: UPS is Hiring from jeff on Vimeo.

To help you concentrate. From Simply Noise.

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch warns MySpace and Facebook to get with the program and include location awareness on their iPhone apps. It seems the biggest obstacle for them are legal and privacy issues, however. The possibility of sexual predators and children-stalkers give them the heebie-jeebies.

This isn't rocket science. Just make location awareness opt-in with an extra layer of controls. First, one can turn "location" off and on at will. Second, one must invite people off their friend lists to participate - and those invites must be accepted. To protect young ones from predators, have the AT&T account holder give consent (usually a parent is paying the bills - I doubt any 13 year olds are forking over $80/month by themselves). Basically, the consent flag clears the phone number in question to use location awareness upon download.

It's silly to think location awareness on MySpace or Facebook puts you on the radar of 3rd degree acquaintances, rock bands, and people you've never met. It doesn't work like that, nor should it. We all have lots of friends on these SNS sites. Some of us, more than a thousand. How practical is it if your phone lights up telling you there are 40 people in a one mile radius of you, half of them you didn't even know were a "friend". That can't happen or the whole location awareness thing is going to flop.

If I have to send invites to friends to participate in the service, it's a whole different ballgame. I'd probably choose a handful of peeps in LA, and maybe some people I'd want to bump into if I ever saw them. Again, they would have to accept the invite. No harm no foul.

Can you imagine people in silicon valley with thousand plus friend-lists (and there's a lot of 'em) when they go our for lunch? Their location pings will go off the charts, and they'll have problems discerning who's actually around. For location awareness to work, users are going to have to limit who is and who isn't "aware-worthy". Hmm, maybe I just coined a new 2.0 term. You heard it here first.

Amazing.

Elaine Warner over at Compete.com offers a glimpse of her company's tools and the insight analytics can provide. It appears that RIM owners are 3.7x more likely than the average internet user (and more likely than owners of other phones) to check out Apple's website.

Ok, you might be wondering how she figured out what kind of phone internet users have. Me too. She just observed the visitor behavior at the OEM sites and made some logical assumptions: if they did things only a phone owner would do, like click on "my-account", they were counted.

Cuil, a new search engine launched today by ex-Googlers certainly got a lot of media hype: front page billing on CNN.com and HuffPo. So I took a look....

First impression:

1. The black screen homepage doesn't look too inviting. Then search results come back at you with a white background. That color transition isn't easy on the eyes.

2. Content wise, Cuil seems competent with popular search terms, although it did hiccup because of the deluge of hits it received today. I got a few goose-eggs when I cuiled my name and again when I searched "highspeed ADC" earlier in the day, although it seems to be behaving now. Cuiling "The Smooth DJ" didn't return my website, or much anything related to music or DJing, but strange pictures of women's underwear. Compare that to Googling the same thing.

3. It's hard to discern ranking of search results. The results page is arranged in columns with no number pairing. After nearly a decade of Googling, this feels counter-intuitive.